Setting the Course for the Future of Mobile Relationships

This past year has been incredible! We’ve more than doubled our number of global enterprise customers and are powering some of the most innovative branded mobile experiences on the planet with many of them sharing their stories at Mobile Saturday at SXSW. We’ve also doubled our number of employees and offices, made our second acquisition, received $25 million in new funding and have gone from 10 billion push messages delivered as of last January to 50 billion, coincidentally, today.

The pace of mobile is only accelerating. There are now more mobile devices than people. Time spent in apps is beginning to rival time spent watching TV, and Gartner tell us that app downloads will grow from 45 billion in 2012 to 305 billion in 2016. In parallel, push messaging has become a critical component of mobile apps, while apps are becoming the centerpiece of brands’ entire marketing strategy not just the tip of their mobile spear. Between apps and new mobile loyalty and reward solutions powered by Apple Passbook and digital wallets, brands have the opportunity to establish their most exciting owned media channels since the web, with the ability to engage and serve their connected consumers wherever and whenever with unmatched precision and relevancy.

With all this momentum, today we are announcing the Airship’s strategic focus on Mobile Relationship Management. This isn’t the typical “put an acronym on it” thing that technology companies love to do. It is a formal recognition that mobile changes everything.

Mobile Relationship Management signals a massive shift from businesses’ traditional focus on paid media and interruption-based marketing tactics towards owned media such as apps and digital wallet initiatives that create a directly addressable audience by putting the customer in control. We believe that for companies to truly win in mobile they must focus on building a trusted relationship. They must be invited onto consumers’ devices and then work to earn their keep. MRM is a mandate for the industry to use everything they know about their customers to create engaging, relevant and valuable mobile experiences because anything less won’t work.

And while the bar for quality interactions is higher on mobile, the opportunity is massive. You can literally have your brand in the hands of your most loyal fans 24X7, learn more about them than ever possible before and reach them directly on the one screen they are never without.

MRM also means a series of enhancements and more sophisticated capabilities coming to Urban Airship’s solutions, including strategic services for customer engagement best practices and expert technical services married to customers’ mobile launches for optimal results out-of-the-gate. Our goal is to make it easier for you to adopt MRM and make your relationship-building efforts more engaging and effective.